Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver never tires of asking big questions, said in TheGuardian.com. A few years before the publication of 1988’s The Bean Trees, the first in a now long line of popular novels, her focus was on completing a Ph.D. dissertation about the genetics of altruism. But then she experienced a crisis of faith. “Lying in bed, counting in my mind the people who would read it, I came up with 11,” she says. Ever since, the Kentucky native has devoted herself to creating stories that tackle difficult subjects in a way that pulls in a healthy audience. Often, she hopes readers will connect enough to the people or places threatened by crisis that they’ll be inspired to act. “Only if you love something,” she says, “will you inconvenience yourself to work on its behalf.”

Kingsolver’s latest novel, Unsheltered, tackles a crisis that she expects many readers are experiencing firsthand, said in O magazine. Willa Knox is a middle-aged out-of-work New Jersey mother who’s realizing that her trust in the American economy to reward hard work was misplaced. The crumbling old house the family lives in affords Kingsolver a chance to flash back to previous occupants from the post–Civil War era. “I usually begin with a question,” she says. “In this case: How do people behave in times of great upheaval?” She has come to believe that in every such era, some people desperately fight change and others embrace it. Willa, for her part, resists until she realizes it’s unwise. She realizes, says Kingsolver, “that yesterday’s people can’t solve tomorrow’s problems—and she’s a yesterday person.”